


Soulmate Material

by ficlicious



Series: Tumblr Prompts & Ficlets [12]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Clint Barton Has Issues, F/M, IronHawk - Freeform, Rule 63, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tony Stark Has Issues, Writing on Skin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 08:40:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8660224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: For as long as she can remember, she’s had her words inked on the inside of her arm. Hours of her life were spent daydreaming about the situations she would one day find herself in where a perfect stranger would turn to her and say can I get a lift?Even in her wildest imaginings, she’d never dreamed she’d find her soulmate on a wreckage-strewn street in the shattered remains of Midtown while aliens poured out of a hole in the sky.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/gifts).



> Because Medie. 
> 
> Always because Medie.
> 
> Some lines of dialogue lifted from _Avengers_.

For as long as she can remember, she’s had her words inked on the inside of her arm. Hours of her life were spent daydreaming about the situations she would one day find herself in where a perfect stranger would turn to her and say  _ can I get a lift? _

Even in her wildest imaginings, she’d never dreamed she’d find her soulmate on a wreckage-strewn street in the shattered remains of Midtown while aliens poured out of a hole in the sky.

She’s had a couple of false positives: unusual as her words are, they’re not the kind of thing someone wouldn’t say except under specific circumstances. A time or two in college, she’d had them slurred at her by drunken fratboys or tipsy friends of friends, and spent a day or so terrified she’d missed her soulmate, because none of them had shown any recognition at her replies to their inquiries.

But when Barton, a man who by all accounts had only recently been Loki’s BFF, looks at her after Captain America tells him to find a high spot and says, “Can I get a lift?”,  _ warmth  _ like nothing she’s ever felt before ignites in her arm and spreads across her chest. 

She only pauses for a second, stunned by the sensation, then shakes it off because  _ aliens are pouring out of a hole in the sky,  _ and reaches for snark like she always does when she’s thrown for a loop. “Better clench up, Legolas,” she quips, grabs the back of his vest, and heads for the sky. 

She drops him on a rooftop, bites her lip and eyes him for a moment as she hovers in midair. He’s staring at her like he’s just seen a ghost, and Toni’s never been more grateful that the helm covers the entirety of her face, because she’s not sure she could have schooled it to hide the hurt and doubt that shoots through her at the horror she thinks she sees in Barton’s eyes. 

She says nothing, and neither does he. She shoots away a second later, unable to bear the silence or the white-faced stare, stuffs it all ruthlessly down behind layers and layers of gold-plated titanium, lets herself be Iron Man and only Iron Man, because being Toni Stark right now is the worst idea in the world. 

**oOoOoOo**

The first five minutes are hair-raising, because Clint can’t get his head in the game and only survives the first wave of aliens coming to knock him off his perch by muscle memory and the skin of his teeth. Out of all the people in the world, it had to be here, now, that he finally heard the words inked on his forearm, that they went warm and bright through his chest and head.

He’s not soulmate material. He wasn’t before Loki, and he certainly wasn’t after Loki’s friendly mindfuck device turned him into a time bomb.

His words are hidden under a strap of his bracer, but he steals glances at his arm anyway, as if they’re going to be glowing through the sturdy leather. He nocks and looses by rote, still lost in the wonder-bafflement-whatthefuck of it being  _ now, today,  _ and only when he sees Loki does his attention abruptly slam back into focus. 

Stark’s voice over the comms nearly yanks him back out again, but he’s got his footing, he’s doing his job, and he manages to stay steady and on task. His heart does manage to leap into his throat though when he sees exactly how many of those fighters are closing in on her. “Stark, you got a lot of strays sniffing your tail.”

There’s no answer for a moment, and then her voice crackles back, wary and tense, but her answer is just as much snark as it is honesty. “Just trying to keep ‘em off the streets.”

He smiles, can’t help it because the warmth is washing up his arm again, and he doesn’t even look as he takes another shot out of the corner of his eye. “Well, they can’t bank worth a damn. Find a tight corner.”

He keeps an eye on her position as she shakes off the tailgaters, and despite himself is impressed at her speed and maneuverability.  _ Head back in the game, Barton,  _ he says, shaking his head clear again. 

“Nice call,” she says, and after a pause that makes him think she isn’t going to say anything else, she adds, “What else you got?”

The smile ratchets up a few notches and he does a quick scan. “Thor’s taking on a squadron down on Sixth,” he says. 

“... and he didn’t invite me.” 

Humor, snark, brilliance, attitude. Elegance and an adrenaline addiction. Damaged goods and a lack of fucks about it. Brash confidence, and blue eyes. All of his weaknesses, all of the things that scare the shit out of him, and Stark’s got them in spades. But maybe, he thinks, listening to her argue with her suit’s AI over whether Jonah was a role model or not, maybe, it’s not going to be the disaster he thinks it will be.

Maybe he’s not soulmate material, but maybe he’s lucked into the one soulmate in the whole goddamn world who can handle him broken and beaten down, and maybe he can do the same for her. 

**oOoOoOo**

After Loki, after Banner shrinks back down to normal size, after shawarma, after SHIELD comes in to start the cleanup efforts, Toni hightails it back to her tower to do the same. She feels like she’s been run over by a space whale, mostly because she has been, several times, and all she wants to do is plant herself face down in her bed and go the fuck to sleep for a year. 

Instead, she picks through the shattered glass and cracked marble flooring of her apartment’s den, makes her way to the bar in the back, but restrains her urge to reach for the alcohol. Instead, she rattles through the bar’s minifridge until she comes back with a half gallon of chocolate milk, then rummages in the freezer until she finds her emergency stash of Ben & Jerry’s. Thus armed, she pulls the blender out from where it was stored the last time she made vodka orange slushies and starts spooning ice cream into the glass pitcher.

While her milkshake is blending, she thumbs the clasp of the silver band on her arm, the one snug to her skin, keeping her words hidden and safe. She pops the clasp, unthreads the ends, and lets the bracelet clatter to the bartop. 

_ Can I get a lift?  _ glitters up at her in black and purple. 

She runs a thumb over the words, jagged letters like someone with careless handwriting doing their best to be neat, and thinks about Barton’s flat out avoidance of her after the battle had blessedly, miraculously ended. There’d been a moment or two she thought they might be able to at least talk about this, but she supposes, bitterly, he’s read her file and has figured out that she’s not soulmate material for  _ anyone,  _ and she never will be. 

She sighs. “Fuck it,” she mutters, thumbs the switch on the blender to “off” and finds the Kahlua and Baileys to splash into the ice cream and milk. 

But when she turns back, bottle in each hand, Barton’s leaning on the counter, eying the blender dubiously. “What’s in it?” he asks. 

“A pint of chocolate brownie fudge and a lot of chocolate milk,” she says, once her heart rate allows her to do silly things like talk at a normal rate again. “And in a minute, it’ll be adult-oriented with the addition of some desperately needed booze.”

“Is it that kind of day?”

“Well, you know.” Toni avoids his eyes as she pours the booze in with a liberal hand. “Alien invasion, nuclear warheads, nearly dying in space, soulmate rejection. Yeah. That kinda day,” she says, then presses the “Blend” button again.

And Barton stabs “Stop” a split second later. “Hold on a second. What the fuck are you talking about? You got another soulmate, maybe? Cos I haven’t rejected you.”

She snorts, looks at him with angry, defensive eyes, a good match for his angry, confused eyes. “Come on, Barton. I know the signs when I see them.” She pulls the pitcher off the base, deciding that it’s blended enough for her needs, and pulls a tall glass out from under the bar. “You’re not wrong,” she continues as she pours her frozen concoction into the glass. “You’re way out of any league I could hope to achieve, and my issues would make Karl Jung weep in terror at the thought of giving me therapy. You’re way better off if we just pretend like we don’t have each other’s words and call it a day.”

There’s nothing but silence for a moment, and Toni finds a straw to stick in the cup. She’s just taken the first sip when Clint starts laughing, hard and helpless. “Oh Christ, Toni,” he says, practically in tears with guffaws. “What a fucking pair we are, because I came up here to give you the same fucking speech.”

She rears back, stung and indignant. “What, that I'm not good enough for you? Thanks, Barton, and fuck you too.”

“No, dumbass,” he chuckles, and gets off the stool to circle around the bar and fetch himself a glass for the rest of the milkshake in the blender. “That I'm not good enough for you. Where do you keep the straws?”

Wary, Toni bends to pull one out of the box beside the glasses. When she straightens, he's working his bracer off his bare arm, and she freezes when she sees his words,  _ better clench up, Legolas,  _ in her neatest block letters, shining red and gold on his skin. 

“So you’re not good enough for me, and I’m not good enough for you. Sounds like we’re a perfect match.” He takes a sip and hisses in disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Stark. Are we going for alcohol poisoning?”

It might say something about her alcohol tolerance that she barely tastes the booze, but that could just be the fact that replacing the palladium with vibranium has left her with a constant, faint taste of coconuts in her mouth. “Again, I warn you that I’m not soulmate material, so you might want to find a match elsewhere,” she says. 

He puts the cup aside, takes hers out of her hand and sets that aside too. “I’m not all that stable a human being myself, Toni. I’ve been a SHIELD agent most of my adult life, and it’s left me with what polite company might call  _ issues  _ of my own. I haven’t thought of myself as soulmate material ever. But here we are. Your words on me, my words on you. We can ignore it, but there isn’t exactly a reset button.”

“No take backsies,” she mumbles, and sighs, pushes her hands through her hair. There’s a reason she avoids this shit, emotional connections, having feelings for other people that can’t be filtered through layers and layers of distancing techniques. “So, what now then? Do we pretend like we’re functional and go on a date? Rush through everything and get married? Do like some soulmates do and ignore each other completely?” 

“What do you want, Stark?” 

She wants to reach for her glass again, desperately wants to, but he’s tangling his fingers through hers, and she doesn’t want him to stop. “I don’t know,” she says, after swallowing hard and steeling herself. 

He smiles at her, one that goes all the way to his eyes and chases the shadows out. “Liar.”

“Eat me,” she shoots back. 

“Love to.” That’s all the warning she gets before his mouth is on hers, tasting like alcohol and chocolate, and his hands are in her hair, and hers are in his, and everything is suffused with warmth and light. 

“What do you want, Toni?” he murmurs against her lips. 

She’s tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of feeling undeserving. Tired of loneliness and a cold bed and one-night stands. “This, Clint,” she murmurs back, dares to put a hand on his arm and run her fingers over his words, feels the tremor in response. “God, it’s going to be a fucking trainwreck, but I do want this.”

“Trainwreck’s good,” he says, kisses her cheek, her temple, her hair, and folds her into a tight embrace. “Anything else, and we’d be bored out of our fucking minds. Lemme see your arm.”

She holds it out for him, and his palm circles her forearm, thumb rubbing lightly over his handwriting. A jolt of heat shoots through her, turns the insides of her eyelids bright and jagged, and she shudders and sags as the tension drains from her shoulders. “No more getting mind controlled,” she mumbles and turns her face into the crook of his neck. 

“No promises,” he says with a snort. “But I’ll try. No more dying in outer space.”

She smiles. “No promises. But I’ll try.” She looks around, side-eyes the couch longingly, but is too busy surveying the damage caused by an Asgardian god, Chitauri invaders, and a pissed-off Hulk. “I’m going to have to go back to Malibu while they’re fixing this shit up,” she grumbles. “Don’t suppose you want to come to California, do you?”

“Not really. Sounds like you don’t really want to go either.”

She sighs, adjusts her head on his shoulder. “I don’t,” she admits, like confessing to homicide. “After the past few days… somewhere quiet would be perfect.”

And for some reason, that statement lights his face up like a Christmas tree. “I know just the place,” he says. “If you’re interested. I’m due for time off. Lots of time off. That I plan on taking. And… you could come with me.”

She eyes him for a second, wonders if she should be feeling so reckless and carefree, decides she isn’t that disturbed by it after all. “Sure,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever taken a vacation. I could probably use one. Where are we going?”

**oOoOoOo**

In an eyeblink, they’ve been on the farm for three months, and Clint’s not sure Toni’s even noticed yet. Once he was convinced to let her rewire and upgrade the house so JARVIS could be installed, and she turned the basement into a small workshop she could disappear into for a few hours at a time, she seemed pretty happy to work on her designs over coffee at the kitchen table and teleconference any unavoidable meetings instead of showing up in person. 

In fact, the only times they’ve left the farm in the last three months have been two in person meetings Toni couldn’t otherwise get out of doing, four SHIELD debriefs and assessments for Clint, and a couple of Avengers calls they both geared up to answer. 

It’s been… Clint doesn’t think he has words for it, but  _ nice  _ might begin to touch on it.

He stirs sugar into two cups of coffee, splashing half-and-half into one and liberally pouring into the other, puts the carton back in the fridge and has Toni’s coffee held out for her to take when she comes through the door. 

She’s stained with grease, wearing her oldest jeans and a Metallica tee he’s sure is nearly as old as she is, hair in a messy upsweep and a scowl on her face that could only mean she’s been wrestling with the tractor again. But she leans up to kiss him distractedly as she takes the coffee cup out of his hand, and closes her eyes as she gulps half the cup in a single pull. 

“I really fucking hate that tractor,” she grouses, after the obligatory fanning of her mouth, a familiar routine because she’s got a bad habit of drinking too hot coffee too fast. “There’s no reason in the goddamn world it shouldn’t work.”

He hides his grin with his coffee cup. “Maybe you should call a mechanic,” he says, innocent as a lamb.

The glare she shoots at him can only be described as  _ withering.  _ “I  _ am  _ a mechanic,” she growls, swigs more coffee down like it’s hard booze. “And I’m telling you, that tractor is an impossible thing. It’s lucky it isn’t my tractor, because I’d recycle the fucking thing into a new tractor. Or maybe a pair of wings for you, since you’re still falling off skyscrapers with alarming regularity.”

“Twice,” he protests. “That happened twice.”

She jabs a finger at him in warning, eyeing him balefully as she finishes her coffee. “Try six times, just on that call with all the weird maniacal robots in hoodies. Twice off the same building, maybe. I’m debating just tying you to the armor and flying around with you strapped to my back.”

He snorts, takes her empty mug and makes her a fresh cup of coffee. “Oh, like that’d be safer for me. I might fall off buildings, Toni, but you have a tendency to get blown through them. Fine for you in the suit, but I’m infinitely squishier than gold and titanium.”

“Then you need wings,” she shoots back, ignores the coffee cup in favor of sliding her arms around his waist. “Give me the damn tractor and you’ll have wings inside of a week.”

He’s always a sucker for Toni in her cuddlier moods, even grease-smeared as she is. He nuzzles into her neck with soft, light kisses, debating the wisdom of proposing with a tractor, but he’s been waiting for an opening for days now, and it’s a weird one, granted, but he’s seizing it. “Well, what if you owned the tractor?”

“Mmphf. I already told you,” she replies, already husky and throaty. “It gets recycled. I get to smash it with glee. You get wings. Everyone wins. Aren’t you paying attention?”

He sighs. Okay. Maybe he’s being a bit too obtuse here. “What if I gave you the tractor and you stayed here all the time? Like, permanently all the time.”

She pulls back from him with a baffled look. “But I do stay here all the time. I’ve barely left. And we’re soulmates, so I think that’s pretty permanent.”

If there was a wall in front of him, he’d be banging his head against it now. He should have waited another few days, done the traditional thing with a ring and a fancy dinner and maybe some shooting at Friday night bad guys to celebrate. “What if I gave you the tractor as a wedding gift and you understand what the fuck I’m saying?”

“What if you came out and actually said _ Toni will you marry me  _ instead of using the weirdest fucking method of proposing I’ve ever—” He knows her brain’s caught up to her mouth when she stops speaking, dead and cold, and just stares wide-eyed at him. 

“Alright,” he says lazily, grinning at the terrified faces she’s making. “Toni, will you marry me?”

“Fuck yes I will,” she blurts, then claps both hands over her mouth as if to stuff the words back in. 

He laughs, giddy with relief and amusement. He reaches out and gently takes her hands away from her mouth, links his fingers through hers. “Glad that’s settled. Tractor’s all yours, babe. Go do whatever you want to it, with my blessing. I’ll keep myself occupied until I get my wings, I’m sure.”

Color abruptly floods back into her face, and she blinks rapidly. “Oh no. Uh uh. You don’t get engaged and then ditch me off on farm equipment. Get your ass in the bedroom. I’m going to take a quick shower and then we’re going to do this the right way.”

“Eloping to Vegas?”

She grins. “If I don’t let Pepper plan my wedding, I’ll never hear the end of it. No eloping to Vegas. Big society wedding. No take-backsies either. Sucker.”

“How ever will I survive?” he says in mock-horror, then laughs as she firmly starts pushing him in the direction of the bedroom. “ _ Alright _ , I’m going. You’re so demanding.”

“I suggested we pretend like we didn’t have each other’s words,” Toni says with a smirk. “I said  _ this can only end in tragedy. _ ”

“Only if we let Pepper plan a big wedding,” he counters, turns and hauls her against him, bends to kiss her until she’s dazed and happy-eyed and breathless. “Vegas.”

“We’re not eloping to Vegas,” she says. 

**oOoOoOo**

They elope to Vegas where, to Clint’s chagrin and Toni’s eternal delight, they get married in a chapel with Legolas as their minister.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on [Tumblr](allthemarvelousrage.tumblr.com).


End file.
